Retail stores selling relatively large yet movable items such as outdoor furniture, lawn mowers and tractors, snow blowers, grills, bicycles and the like often find it desirable to display such items outside the confines of their building. Typically the inventory is displayed at or near the entrance to the store to attract the attention of shoppers as they enter or leave the store. The storefront often offers the only suitable space large enough to display more than one or two bulky items such as outdoor furniture or power equipment.
Securing such openly displayed inventory from theft and damage is a problem. This is especially true at the close of business. In the past store owners seeking to secure outdoor inventory have had to choose among several undesirable options. One option is to physically move the inventory back into the confines of the store's building. This takes considerable time at a point in the workday when employees are anxious to leave the premises, leading to the risk of damage to the inventory. It also requires considerable inside storage space, the absence of which is commonly what lead to the outdoor display in the first place. Thus, moving the inventory inside usually means placing it in a temporary location where it will interfere with some other normal operation of the store.
An alternative to moving the inventory back into the store is to leave it out but physically secure it to prevent removal. This typically meant use of long metal chains or stranded steel cable attached somehow to the items and with both terminal ends of the chain or cable anchored and locked to the property. The inventory items sometimes do not have a convenient attachment point for the chain or cable, which requires the chain to be looped through or around a handle or a similar component not designed for the purpose, sometimes with resultant damage to the finish of the item. A further alternative to the chain or steel cable is a long, single length of electrical cable secured to the items and connected to an alarm system. While an insulated electrical cable is less likely to damage the inventory than a chain or steel cable, it shares with the chain and steel cable another drawback.
The basic problem with prior, single-length physical or electrical securement devices was that, during business hours, should a customer want to purchase one of the products that was anywhere remote from the ends of the cable, the seller has to disconnect the entire inventory between the two end pieces and the item being sold, just to release the item being delivered to the customer. This requires significant time and labor. Plus every time you disconnect and reconnect the securement devices you add to the chances of damaging the unsold inventory.
Securement devices that incorporate an electrical cable connected to some type of electrical alarm circuit have the further problem of electrically connecting the securement device to the alarm circuit. While electrical connections between the alarm circuit and the cable of the securement device could be hard-wired to the securement cable, this limits the flexibility of such a device in that at least one end, and possibly both ends, of the cable must be physically connected to the alarm circuit. While a wireless connection between the alarm circuit and the cable of the securement device is possible, powering the wireless connection is a problem. While power to the wireless connection could be supplied by plugging the cable into a regular power outlet, doing this limits where the securement device can be installed and essentially defeats the purpose of having a wireless connection in the first place. Battery power for a wireless connection, on the other hand, presents its own issues in terms of battery life and limitations on the length of a cable that can be used with a battery-powered alarm circuit.